Author using Lenovo Thinkpad Carbon x1
To call it by its full name, this is “Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Intel Aura Edition” – such a long name will not fit in a Forbes headline. The latest and greatest generation of Intel’s latest Lunar Lake Sports X1 processor. My test system came specced with the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V, which is somewhere in the middle of Intel’s lineup. It also came with 32GB of RAM; Lenovo only offers this model in 16GB or 32GB configurations, because with Lunar Lake the memory is on-chip, so there’s no way to upgrade beyond that. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend a 16GB configuration, especially since that’s the bare minimum for a Copilot+ PC—and the memory-hungry apps are growing by the day.
The configuration sent to me isn’t available on Lenovo’s website because mine has 512GB of storage, while the site sells this model with a minimum of 1TB, so I’d assume this spec as tested would run somewhere around $2,300 . To get around the extra long name, I renamed my PC “Carbon Aura”. (No, I can’t resist a delicious food treat.)
Thinkpad X1 Carbon Design and Materials
To start with the knockout feature of this machine, this is without a doubt the most absurdly light laptop I’ve ever used. This aspect of him is so pronounced that it has spoiled me; Now, whenever I pick up any other computer (even other Lenovo laptops), they all feel so Heavy To put it another way, there were times when I forgot this laptop was in my bag altogether.
The 14-inch clamshell is clearly made with premium materials, and the laptop has a very professional look with traditional ThinkPad branding, including the red light dot on the outside, the Trackpoint keyboard, and a glass keyboard. Speaking of the Touchpad, I think it’s the perfect size for a 14-inch notebook, and I like the physical right and left buttons for precision. That said, I wish the Touchpad had better haptics to match the quality of the keyboard, which I found fantastic for typing. The keyboard also has one of the best fingerprint sensors in the industry; This synaptic sensor lies just to the right of the copilot button. The chassis is wrapped in a soft-touch material that I personally like, although some people don’t like it because it can be a magnet for visible fingerprints.
The display is a gorgeous 14-inch OLED with a 120-Hertz refresh rate, though this laptop ships with a 60-Hertz display by default—likely to reduce the drain on battery life. (OLEDs generally tend to make a bigger dent in battery life than IPS LCDs.) The resolution is 2.8K, which is great for almost any size laptop, but especially for a 14-in. The display also has a respectable 400 nits of brightness and 100% DCI-P3 color gamut, plus I really like its anti-glare coating. That said, it would be nice if it could go brighter for better outdoor use.
Part of the display is a signature Lenovo camera, which includes a 1080p video camera and a Windows Hello camera stack. While the performance of these is on par with the rest of the industry, I think it’s time for Lenovo to upgrade the camera quality to 5MP or greater, as this is an executive laptop and competitors including HP have made 5MP of default in many of their high-end notebooks. The webcam also comes standard with a privacy shutter, which disables both the webcam and Windows Hello.
Connectivity and storage
512GB of storage – there’s both 1TB and 2TB configurations available – is powered by an SK Hynix Gen 5 SSD, meaning you get the fastest interface and drive technology a must-have in a notebook such premium. I tested the sequential read speed at 14GB/s, which is respectable for an OEM Gen 5 SSD, but I was a little less impressed with the 7GB/s write speed, which is more like 3. This is especially important for anyone transferring large files from a USB drive, an external drive or even a camera.
Speaking of file transfers, this laptop sports a generous four USB ports, including two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 connectors and two full-size USB-A 5GBPS connectors. The USB-C connectors are both on the left side, which I believe is a mistake, but it certainly makes Thunderbolt signaling on the PCB easier. I’m a firm believer that every laptop should have a USB-C port on each side for charging. I can’t tell you how many times on multiple laptops I’ve had to run the charging cable strangely because I didn’t have USB-C slots available on either side.
The laptop also has an HDMI 2.1 port, which supports resolutions up to 4K60 outdoors, along with a headphone/microphone combo. I don’t know how much longer there will be HDMI ports out there, but I hope those that do eventually go by the wayside in favor of another USB-C connector. That all said, I noticed that when using 40 Gbps and Thunderbolt 5 compatible cables, memory card transfers weren’t as fast as with my desktop, which gets north of 800 MB/s in a card reader 10 GBP. This laptop was in the mid 600s to 700s, just like the rest of the laptops I tested.
Wi-Fi and Bluetooth in this machine are powered by an Intel BE201 2×2 chipset, which combines Bluetooth 5.3 and Wi-Fi 7. This chipset is usually bundled by Intel with its CPUs, and OEMs generally use it because is a good solution that is also performant in most configurations.
This laptop features a highly efficient 65-watt fast charging solution that Lenovo claims delivers an 80% charge in one hour. I found this to be an extremely valuable feature because I’ve been bad at charging laptops due to their long battery life, and an 80% charge is more than enough for a full day’s work. The nice thing is that the default 65-watt charger is extremely small and light, weighing in at just 9 ounces, half of which comes from the cables. That said, you should get enough battery life out of this system that you might not even need to carry the charger with you every day. The standby power on this laptop is also very good, so you don’t need to take it down every night, or you can charge it up and come back to it in a few days (or even weeks) without worrying about it dying. Traditionally, this was one of my biggest pet peeves for most Windows PCs, but it has finally been addressed by most chip vendors and PC OEMs. Lunar Lake is especially good for this; I believe its quality in this area was probably driven by a desire to match Apple and Qualcomm’s crazy battery life.
Thinkpad X1 Carbon performance
The Core Ultra 7 258V processor is a balanced choice for good battery life and good performance. This CPU has a strong single-core performance in the Geekbench 6 tests, on par with many of the Snapdragon systems I’ve tested, and it beat the Asus Zenbook S 16 using AMD’s Ryzen AI 370HX processor. (For more context, see my review of that zenbook.) However, in multicore performance in the same benchmark, this Intel processor fell behind the pack by a good 10% to 20%, meaning it can contend with several multithreaded applications compared to the competition. As a business laptop, the X1 Carbon Aura edition needs to be fast and compatible, so CPU performance is fundamentally the most important thing, more than GPU or AI performance. Because this is a Lunar Lake platform, the capabilities of Windows Copilot+ are still in preview, but they will surely reach a wider audience soon.
In a rare setback for this laptop, I found Wi-Fi 7 performance over an MLO network to be inconsistent and slower than with comparable laptops. Moving away from MLO and going straight to 6-Gigahertz Wi-Fi exclusively, performance was much more in line with the competition. Personally, I’d recommend 6-Gigahertz Wi-Fi if your router is good enough because it has significantly less interference and way more spectrum, but if your device is MLO capable, that provides the best of both worlds. since you can simultaneously be on both 5-Gigahertz and 6-Gigahertz, plus it improves throughput and range even 6-Gigahertz. After doing comparisons with another unit from Lenovo at CES, I believe some of the Wi-Fi issues I encountered may have been specific to my test device.
Battery life and durability
The battery life of this device is quite good – I’d say among the best I’ve seen from Intel’s Lunar Lake platforms, even when running an OLED display. That said, this is also part of a more mature wave of Lunar Lake hardware; I expect battery life to continue to improve as Intel honors its platform optimizations. The laptop sports a 57 WHR battery, which is also recommended for customers. I believe this is great for keeping the device in service for a long time, which is basically the best way to be green. I’m not entirely surprised that this laptop only has a 57 WHR battery, though it actually puts it in the same class as the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 and the HP Elitebook Ultra, which are Snapdragon-based machines that perform similar, but even better Battery Life. (I wrote a comparison review of several laptops of this type, including the Surface Laptop 7 and the Elitebook Ultra, a few months ago.)
Aside from the user-replaceable battery, the laptop came in extremely “green” packaging, with almost everything in the package being made from recyclable or sustainable materials, even down to the laptop case’s handle and the twist ties to wrap the cables. No detail was lost, and it was obvious that Lenovo put in the extra effort here – and it deserves recognition for that.
A great all-round professional laptop
The Lenovo Thinkpad Carbon X1 Gen 13 Intel Aura Edition lives up to the reputation of the X1 Carbon series by delivering one of the most durable (MIL-Spec 810G), light and premium notebooks on the market. With Lunar Lake, an OLED screen and absurdly light chassis and cooling solution, this was by far one of my favorite laptops of 2024 and an incredibly easy recommendation for anyone looking for a well-balanced business notebook with plenty of specs. good ones.